Kondoot
August 11th, 2011 | No Comments »
As of a couple of months ago I have been working for a new social media start-up called Kondoot. The site is a live video streaming website with the ability to chat, video call, and more. Check it out!
Norton & Triumph Tshirt designs
September 20th, 2010 | No Comments »
Above are two T-shirt designs I recently uploaded to my portfolio, I thought to add it here on the blog to provide a bit of information about the bikes and rider that don’t seem appropriate on a portfolio but are important nevertheless. If you know me personally you have doubtless seen me wearing the black shirt on many an occasion.
The rider is my grandfather, Garth McBryde, who rode, created and fixed motorcycles his whole life. He had a huge passion for vintage bikes and it was his recent passing prompted the designs. The Black shirt has an image of an early 50′s Norton 650 twin, either a Tiger 100 or 110. The white image is of another early 50′s bike, a Norton ES2 500cc single. It may be noted that both original photos were taken before 1961, before the worlds first mandatory Motorcycle Helmet Law was introduced in Australia.
Stacey – a PHP Flat file CMS
August 18th, 2010 | No Comments »
In my last post I promised to quickly run down my reasons for using the simple, flat file Content Management system Stacey to manage my portfolio.
Why flat file?
As I am sure we are all aware, a traditional CMS is software that allows you to update your content through a user-friendly interface, and generally stores the content in some sort of database. Reasons to use this style of Content Management System includes being easy to use, they enable your site to be accessible from any browser, and you can leverage already existing code to extend your site’s functionality easily.
Sounds good, however there are as many downsides, which I have learned over many years of using a diverse range of software packages both commercial and open source. For one, being a technically savvy computer user, there is little advantage for myself to have a web-based interface as all of my development work is done from my home computer or my laptop. An interface can also be quite inflexible, getting a design pixel-perfect is often quite a chore, and while they are more convenient for an editors point of view from a development aspect they are more challenging due to the existence of a database. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you cannot easily track and manage the information using a version control management tool such as Git.
A flat file system by contrast, stores all content within a simple file system rather than a database. This allows content as well as structure to be tracked and deployed easily. From a pure efficiency standpoint flat file systems are awesome. I can make a change to my content on my local machine using a text editor and Markdown, push up to my external Git repo, and deploy to my server in seconds without having to touch a database management interface or FTP.
The main thing that I have learned is that while CMS’s are crucial for some purposes, they are actually overcomplicating and problematic for others. Learning where this line is definitely important.
Why Stacey?
There are a few reasons, because its designed for designers, the developer is Australian (biased I know), is simple to use and extend, and also I just really like the bare-bones, minimalistic style.
Portfolio update
July 13th, 2010 | No Comments »
I would like to quickly introduce my new portfolio. I used a simple and elegant content management system called Stacey to structure the information, and I will go into the reasons behind this in a later post. For now please have a look and feel free to give feedback.
Working with SSL in Codeigniter
March 11th, 2009 | 13 Comments »
For the best part of 3 months I’ve been trying to find an elegant way to switch between http:// and https:// for certain pages. I crawled the forums and found a number of solutions. The first was to use the .htaccess file and mod_rewrite to rewrite the url. This solution was fine on one server but I had to switch recently and suddenly it was failing miserably for no reason that I could determine, so I was forced to find another way. As always, finding another way is a _good_ thing, and the way I found is nicer, easier and much more dynamic.
Create a file in application/helper called ssl_helper.php
if (!function_exists('force_ssl'))
{
function force_ssl()
{
$CI =& get_instance();
$CI->config->config['base_url'] =
str_replace('http://', 'https://',
$CI->config->config['base_url']);
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != 443)
{
redirect($CI->uri->uri_string());
}
}
}
function remove_ssl()
{
$CI =& get_instance();
$CI->config->config['base_url'] =
str_replace('https://', 'http://',
$CI->config->config['base_url']);
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT'] != 80)
{
redirect($CI->uri->uri_string());
}
}Load the helper, then in the constructor for any controller that requires ssl, simply insert:
force_ssl();In every controller that you don’t want to have ssl put:
if (function_exists('force_ssl')) remove_ssl();And there you go. I found the force_ssl function on the Codeigniter forum, so all credit goes to the original poster. All I did was provide a function to switch back.